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shikamaru317 on 21 December 2022
Yeah, those points against are mostly laughably bad. Quite alot of them can be disproved by anyone with even half a brain cell.
- Of course Xbox has the resources to build up a 1st party that can compete with Sony without acquisitions, but that takes alot more time and carries substantially more financial risk compared to buying already successful developers. Allowing Xbox to acquire a few more publishers and developers is the fastest path to building a market where Sony isn't totally dominant, that is a good thing for everyone if there is closer competition between Xbox and Sony.
- Consolidation of the market is already happening all around us, Tencent, Netease, and Embracer are constantly either acquiring studios or making huge investments in them. Sony has acquired like 6 developers in less than 3 years. But right now the gaming market is far less consolidated that Books, movies, or tv, out of the main entertainment types.
- Saying that it paves the way for more giant publishers to be acquired is silly, the regulators can oversee each attempted publisher acquisition on a case by case basis and block any they think crosses over the point of too much market consolidation, there is no reason to block ABK just to stop a potential deluge of publisher acquisitions by others, just block those future acquisitions if they create problems.
- Minecraft is precedent that Xbox won't make franchises as large as CoD exclusive, plus they are willing to sign 10 year deals to keep it multiplat.
- Xbox is not going to start releasing exclusive CoD content or kneecapping CoD performance on PS consoles, Phil has stated many times that he thinks exclusive content is one of the worst practices in the industry, and he has no incentive to damage a big franchise like CoD just to boost Xbox hardware a tiny bit
- PS Now is already the leader in the subscription market, not Gamepass, and Sony could easily stay competitive with an ABK boosted Gamepass if they put their 1st/2nd/3rd party exclusives on there at launch just like Xbox does
- Xbox currently has 3 other big competitors in Cloud gaming, there is no guarantee that ABK alone would be enough for Xbox to dominate the cloud market, it just means they others may need to work a bit harder to keep up, driving competition.
- I don't see how this merger affects indies and new game developers at all
- Sony already has the most bargaining power with 3rd party publishers (it's how they are able to get exclusives and exclusive content and such so easily), how does Xbox catching up to them harm anything?
